Gallery

Slow WaterVictoria Clare Bernie

Bloomscape is an eight panel digital photographic drawing tracing the landscape’s surface of northern Argyll from Rannoch Moor along Loch Etive to Kerrara Island. Inspired by nautical charts and the practice of map-making, Bloomscape embeds a series of digital mappings within the indeterminate skin of a fast moving water surface.

The Islas Orcadas Seamounts in the South Atlantic Ocean are a mapped fiction, the consequence of a computer error in the mapping of the Weddell Sea. As an imagined landscape they hover somewhere in the imagination between Atlantis and the rather crude Russo-American sub aquatic land-grabs of recent history. Islas Orcadas traces a detail from a Scottish fjord into the landscape of a frozen pond.

Our Friends and NeighboursVictoria Clare Bernie, 2011Microscopic digital photography: multiple photographs taken through a microscope and recomposed using photographic software

Our Friends and Neighbours is a 10 image photographic record of marine sampling undertaken during autumn fieldwork in the upper basin of Loch Etive in Northern Argyll. The same Autumn fieldwork described in the installed video work, Calanas. It is an alternative take on the rigorous taxonomic processes of marine research science. Every creature is magnified from an approximate starting point of 4mm x 4mm, lit by angle poises in miniature and recorded through 73 individual images. The focused point of each image is amalgamated into a single, composite portrait.

PortraitsVictoria Clare Bernie, 2011Digital photography

One image made up of six separate photographs, and one diptych record a journey through a remote landscape in winter.

The Long Snowfall is a fieldworking film, a diptych account of the sequence and processes of sonar mapping in a winter landscape. The work records and describes the intricacy of mapping in the close confines of a research vessel. It shows the water trace or wake left by the vessel as it literally ploughs the water surface hour upon hour recording the landscape beneath.

Hydro is a video mapping of the hydroelectric infrastructure of northern and western Scotland, a remarkable and controversial engineering project that wrote the monumental architecture of 20th century industry across the Highland landscape as an apparently seamless succession of dams and aqueducts, intakes and reservoirs.

Nightswimming depicts freshwater science as it plays out – seasonally – on a burn in the northeast Highlands of Scotland. The work describes a site, a process and a ‘natural’ phenomenon – the return, capture and management of wild Atlantic Salmon – at the scale of human intervention.

Calanas is the Gaelic term for spinning, weaving, manufacture. The work follows the sequence of autumn fieldwork practices undertaken by a group of marine research scientists studying the conditions of the sea floor. The site for the work – a sea loch in northwest Scotland – acting as a form of inland sea, protected waters for the intimate study of marine life. The scientific processes and the physical intelligence of field science are depicted as an observed ‘dance’, an interplay of people, machines, vessels and water.